Abstract
The still popular idea that human rights are ‘natural rights’ is highly misleading. Although philosophical accounts of human rights have to be based on the presupposition of membership in the human species and also on an ‘axiom of human equality’, the purpose of human rights is not to transform pre-political or ‘inborn’ claims already given in a state of nature but to implement power restrictions that only become necessary if modern citizens understand themselves as the legitimizing subjects of political power. Therefore, human rights should be interpreted as ‘constitutional rights’ from the conceptual outset. The subject of human rights is not the pre-political or natural human being but the somehow anticipated, democratically transformed, and also revolutionary subject of his or her own future. Therefore, a plausible human rights approach can and should abstain from any substantial references to human nature, since a political system regulated by basic constitutional rights is quite artificial or even ‘against’ human nature.
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Notes
- 1.
For a critical discussion, see Hudson (1969).
- 2.
This survey will aim at identifying systematic differences between arguments rather than philologically sorting out various authors. These authors mostly mix up at least some of the following patterns.
- 3.
However, the term ‚inborn’ is quite misleading here. These approaches often extend human rights protection to prenatal life as well.
- 4.
I will pass over the methodological question as to whether these approaches are really easier to validate.
- 5.
One could draw the opposite conclusion, namely that theses rights cannot be ‘proper’ human rights and should therefore be dropped from the UN-lists. But the global acceptance of these rights in international law empirically contradicts this conclusion.
- 6.
For differences between these two sorts of naturalism see McDowell (1996).
- 7.
Although Food did not touch upon the subject of human rights, her book had a great impact on the discussion.
- 8.
It shall not to be denied that human rights can be understood as the result of an historical learning process, but certainly it cannot be a directed or linear one. See introduction to Menke and Pollmann (2007).
- 9.
There are important differences between the political idea of human rights and the interpersonal scope of ‘morality’, which can include non-human beings as well. See Menke and Pollmann (2007, ch. 1).
- 10.
‘Generic’ statements are generalizing statements about the typical qualities inherent in examples of a certain type (lat. genus) which ‘exemplify’ this type by manifesting those qualities normally, though not necessarily constantly or completely. I am grateful to Thomas Hoffmann for this clarification.
- 11.
Many other important justificatory problems remain if we do accept this conceptual first premise: What, for example, speaks in favor of ‘human dignity’, for the concrete rights in detail, their ‘universalism’ or their ‘indivisibility’? What about their legal implementation, the legitimacy of the international human rights regime, or the question of humanitarian intervention?
- 12.
For a thoughtful discussion see Hey (2001).
- 13.
What is unclear in cases of, e.g., embryos, mentally disabled persons, or people in comas is not whether they are members of the human species but how strictly this membership should be treated with respect to human rights; in other words, how consequently one is willing to accept the normative implication that indeed all human beings should count as (full) members from the start.
- 14.
See the contributions to Schleidgen et al. (2011).
- 15.
Think, for example, of legally quite new but widely accepted human rights like the right to intellectual property or the right to informal self-determination with respect to laws governing data protection, private data security, and the private sphere.
- 16.
Article 1 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) [italics inserted by author].
- 17.
One might remember George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945): “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” The pigs were meant.
- 18.
See Radbruch (1993, 259): “Equality is not a given fact. Things and human beings are unequal like one egg varies from the other. Equality is always an abstraction from given inequality seen from a specific reference point” [translated by author.].
- 19.
Compare this with the well-known differentiation by Dworkin (1978, 272), that “the right to equal treatment” has to be distinguished from the “right to the treatment as an equal”.
- 20.
It was Rousseau (1984, 77) who clarified this additional difference between two forms of empirical inequalities.
- 21.
This stands in contrast e.g. to egalitarian theories of ‘social justice’ which claim for a far more demanding idea of equality by including not just basic rights but also resources, chances etc. that are not (or should not be) protected by human rights.
- 22.
Vlastos (1962).
- 23.
Very similar: Feinberg (1973, 93).
- 24.
Additionally, the six naturalistic accounts presented above will only then come to the result of equal rights if they presuppose an equal worthiness as already given.
- 25.
By persistently using “would” here, it is indicated that this is a thought experiment and not a historical narrative. Nevertheless, such acts of constitution-making have taken place; e.g. in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, around the year of 1989 or in so-called Arab Spring.
- 26.
From French constitutionnel derived from Latin constituere, ‘to arrange, settle, found, set up’.
- 27.
Not just human rights are part of this modern progress but also e.g. the new idea of a division of powers, the implementation of political participation or the humanization of criminal law.
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Pollmann, A. (2014). Human Rights Beyond Naturalism. In: Albers, M., Hoffmann, T., Reinhardt, J. (eds) Human Rights and Human Nature. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8672-0_9
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